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Google and Mesosphere today announced a partnership that brings support for Mesos clusters to Google’s Compute Engine platform. While the Mesos project and Mesosphere aren’t quite household names yet, they are quickly becoming important tools for companies that want to be able to easily scale their applications, no matter whether that’s in their own data centers, in a public cloud service, or as a hybrid deployment.

With this collaboration between Google and Mesosphere, Cloud Platform users will now be able to set up a Mesosphere cluster on Google’s servers in less than 10 minutes. Developers get to choose between two basic installs: a development cluster with four instances, eight virtual CPUs and 30GB of memory for prototyping their applications, or a production-ready install with 18 instances, 36 virtual CPUs and 136GB of memory. If those two options don’t fit, they can also create their own custom clusters.

By default, those clusters include the Mesos kernel, Zookeeper, Marathon and OpenVPN. Once the cluster is up and running, Mesosphere offers a straightforward web-based dashboard for managing these clusters that can be accessed right from the Google dashboard.

As Florian Leibert, the co-founder and CEO of Mesosphere told me earlier this week, the main idea behind Mesosphere has always been to allow developers to treat a data center like a single computer — with Mesos and other software packages abstracting much of the basic devops work away. Some companies that currently use Mesos are Leibert’s former employers Twitter and Airbnb, which he introduced to the open-source Mesos project.

Mesosphere essentially creates a layer on top of your hardware that handles all of the servers, virtual machines and cloud instances in the background and lets an application draw from a single pool of resources like CPU power and memory. By default, Mesosphere’s service does not really care what operating system you run or what cloud you are using. The team tells me, however, that it worked with Google to optimize its offerings for its cloud to take full advantage of the environment (you can read a bit more about Mesosphere and its tools here).

As part of the partnership with Google, Mesosphere also today announced that it is integrating Google’s recently launched open source Kubernetes service for managing Docker containers right into Mesopshere. The company says this will make it easier to manage the deployments of Docker workloads. It’s worth noting that this is not just for running Mesosphere on the Google Cloud Platform. As Leibert notes in today’s announcement, “our combined compute fabric can run anywhere, whether on Google Cloud Platform, your own datacenter, or another cloud provider.”

Google’s Craig McLuckie, its lead product manager for next generation cloud computing products like Kubernetes, also told me that what Google wanted to do with Kubernetes was to bring many of the core concepts that it has developed for managing its own datacenters to users outside the company. He believes that what Mesosphere and Google are working on is “very complementary” and that he believes that the company can bring some of the concepts it developed into Mesos, too.

As Mesosphere’s senior VP Matt Trifiro (and former Heroku CMO) told me, he believes that projects like Kubernetes and Mesos can bring some of these “rarefied air concepts” behind these technologies to everybody. What happened so far, he argues, is that “the tooling hasn’t kept up with being accessible for companies that need to get to web scale.” But now with the expertise from Google and Mesos, the company can make these concepts consumable for developers so they can operate at a new abstraction level that frees them from directly dealing with much of the infrastructure that powers their applications.

“We look forward to working with Google to make Cloud Platform the best place to run traditional Mesosphere workloads, such as Marathon, Chronos, Hadoop, or Spark—or newer Kubernetes workloads,” Leibert writes today.

It’s probably not too early to start thinking about whether Mesosphere could become an acquisition target for Google given how close the two companies worked together on this project. For now that’s just speculation, of course, but if it ever happens, remember you read it here first.

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Crunchbase

OverviewThe Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DC/OS) is a new kind of operating system that spans all of the servers in a physical or cloud-based datacenter, and runs on top of any Linux distribution. Mesosphere's DC/OS makes executing and managing applications in a data center just like launching applications on a laptop by running them on Apache Mesos.

OverviewGoogle is a multinational corporation that is specialized in internet-related services and products. The company’s product portfolio includes Google Search, which provides users with access to information online; Knowledge Graph that allows users to search for things, people, or places as well as builds systems recognizing speech and understanding natural language; Google Now, which provides information …

BioIn early 2013, Flo co-founded Mesosphere, an early-stage tech start-up which is creating the operating system for "datacenter computing" -- in other words, open source technology for warehouse-scale distributed computing. The Apache Mesos project challenges the quintessential ways that people think about large scale computing and data processing, resulting in a dramatic rise in utilization rates for …